Black­est Night #1

In this, the first issue of Black­est Night, Carol Fer­ris shoots a robot in the crotch with the power of love.

Ok, so a lot more hap­pens either side of that one scene. Some good, some bad. But over­all this is a pretty solid start to DC’s 2009 event.

Tales of the Corps #1

I under­stand what they’re try­ing to do with this 3 issue minis­eries. Using it to shine a light on lesser char­ac­ters that don’t get a whole lot of back­story in the reg­u­lar titles. But two out three of the sto­ries here just aren’t that inter­est­ing. First up is an ori­gin for Saint Walker, that doesn’t add that much more to his char­ac­ter. Yes he went through many, many hor­ri­ble events one after the other before finally real­is­ing his des­tiny, but so what. Name one saint that hadn’t endured a long shitty exis­tence before get­ting their halo?

The sec­ond story isn’t all that excit­ing either. It spins a tale of  Mongul’s child­hood dur­ing one mag­i­cal sum­mer where he was the ruler of some aliens who had crash landed on his plant. But who cares because that kid grows up into an ass­hole tyrant who uses a magic ring to con­trol his sev­ered arm and who also ripped another alien’s tongue out just so that alien wouldn’t talk back to him anymore.

Luck­ily, the third and final story shows some merit. Full points for hav­ing the nomadic Indigo Lanterns sound like char­ac­ters from The Gods Must Be Crazy.

Dark Avengers #7

I dis­cov­ered I enjoy read­ing Dark Avengers writ­ten by Matt Frac­tion a lot more than when it’s writ­ten by Brian Michael Bendis.

Com­plete List

Black­est Night #1 (of 8)
Black­est Night Tales of the Corps #1 (of 3)
Wednes­day Comics #2 (of 12)
Agents Of Atlas #8
Dark Avengers #7
Incog­nito #5
Mighty Avengers #27
X-Factor #46

There’s just far too many comics to review all of them this week. 14 of them, thanks to Marvel’s poor/genius sched­ul­ing. Instead you get one book from each of the Big Two.

Detec­tive Comics #854

My only brush with Greg Rucka came through his work on 52. Where he put a lot of work into the entwined sto­ries of  Bat­woman and The Ques­tion. So I guess it’s only fit­ting that I get reac­quainted with his work through a book that stars those two char­ac­ters. Yes I’m aware they had their own post-52 minis­eries, but I didn’t read that as, to me , that par­tic­u­lar story seemed to have been played out in the pages of 52 already.

At first glance the Kate Kane in this book seems vastly dif­fer­ent than that one who appeared in 52. She’s less a socialite and more of an army brat. She’s got tat­toos and it’s implied she sleeps (or slept) around. Yes, she’s still a les­bian, and yes it comes up but only in a way to flesh out her “com­mit­ted to the mis­sion” mindset.

Before this book, id you’d asked me to point out art by JH Williams I woul’dve had no chance. Would not know him from a bar of soap. After read­ing this book I have every panel burnt out to my brian. In a good way of course. And the panel lay­out. Wow. There’s one two page sequence depict­ing that I loved. A series of light­ning bolt pan­els depicts Bat­woman talk­ing to Bat­man then head­ing back to base and chang­ing back into civil­lian clothes, under­scored by a shot of Bat­woman, on her motor­cy­cle, shoot­ing across the page.

There’s this incred­i­ble amount of energy that crack­les off every page.

Mean­while over in the Ques­tion backup…sorry “co-feature”, Renee Mon­toya seems to have become DC’s answer to the Heroes for Hire. Using an email account and/or web­site to solicit inves­tiga­tive work. Her first case pit­ting her against human traffickers.

It reads like it was orig­i­nally pitched as a full length story that’s been slimmed down through pre­cise cuts. Noth­ing is miss­ing really, but there’s no great expla­na­tion of the bad guy pos­si­ble motives, just that he’s the damn bad guy.

Dark Avengers/Uncanny X-Men: Utopia #1

After the let­down of an event that was Brian Michael Bendis’ Secret Inva­sion I har­boured a feel­ing that, given half a chance, Matt Frac­tion could easy write the next Mar­vel event. And here it is.

I’m glad it’s not a company-wide thing as I really couldn’t han­dle another one of those from Mar­vel. But it does carry the Dark Reign tag, which I cna’t really get enthused about. Even though most of the Mar­vel side of my pull list involves Dark Reign in some way.

The story seems organic enough. At the end of Secret Inva­sion, when Nor­man Osbourne was given the job of…well what­ever the hell it is he actu­ally does, he put all mutants on notice. Telling Emma Frost that if they couldn’t con­trol them­selves then he would. Or words to that effect.

In this first issue of the inde­ter­mi­nately long minis­eries (there’s no “#1 of #3″ on the cover, just “Chap­ter One”) Simon Trask organ­ises a march on San Fran­sisco in sup­port of a new law to ster­ilise all mutants, which of course leads to all hell break­ing loose. Really, nobody watched the first 10 min­utes of Die Hard 3?

With half of San Fran­sisco on fire Nor­man Osbourne makes good on his promise and sends in the Dark Avengers to con­trol things. Which of course they don’t because they’re all psy­chopaths. Then Nor­man takes Emma Frost aside reit­ter­ates whats he first told her and then pro­motes her to Leader of All Mutants. Charles Xavier shows up to talk down Cyclops, but it’s revealed to the  reader that the real Charles Xavier is lying in a prison cell with his brain leak­ing down his shirt. None of which makes a whole lot of a sense.

But, this is only the first issue, and I’ve got enough faith that Frac­tion will spin out a few inter­est­ing con­cepts before bring­ing every­thing to a decent conclusion.

Of  course Mar­vel get full praise for keep­ing Greg Land as far from this story as pos­si­ble. Marc Sil­vestri han­dles the art in a pass­able fash­ion. It’s a lot more basic than his linework from back when Grant Mor­ri­son wrote the book, with most of the humans look­ing like scare­crows. And a small but sig­nif­i­cant draw­ing of a continuity-breaking, male Loki.

Com­plete List

Detec­tive Comics #854
Green Lantern #42
Aston­ish­ing X-Men #30
Avengers: Ini­tia­tive #25
Dark Avengers #6
Dark Avengers/Uncanny X-Men: Utopia #1
Immor­tal Iron Fist TP Vol 04 Mor­tal Iron Fist
Ms Mar­vel #40
New Avengers #54
Run­aways 3 #11
Secret War­riors #5
Thun­der­bolts #133
Uncanny X-Men #512
X-Factor #45
X-Force #16
Wiz­ard Mag­a­zine #214

Ulti­mate Fan­tas­tic Four #60

60 issues? Thats it? Man, even the manga ver­sion of Sab­rina the Teenage Witch man­aged to hit 100 issues before it bowed out.

Ulti­mate Fan­tas­tic Four started out with a strong idea. Four teenagers — trans­formed into vaguely ele­men­tal forms through a mishap with an exper­i­men­tal trans­porter — team up to have adven­tures through time and space. It should’ve been fun as hell, and it was for the most part, until Mike Carey came on board and things began to go wrong.

Start­ing with his reg­u­lar run all the technical/scifi stuff (stacked uni­verses, time travel) was pushed to one side — replaced with some ridicu­lously con­vo­luted Space Opera. Really, what the hell was that Seed Nine­teen stuff about anyway?

With Carey gone I’d hoped they’d be able to bring the title back around, make it fun and excit­ing again, but this was not meant to be. As near as I can tell the new writer was brought on solely to pro­vide filler for Jeph Loeb’s Ulti­ma­tum. The remain­ing two main char­ac­ters team up with two ene­mies to head to Atlantis, a place they’ve already been despite what they say, to use a macguf­fin that makes no sense what­so­ever. All this was eas­ily explained when I dis­cov­ered the writer’s main source of income was writ­ing episodes of Heroes, the scifi equiv­a­lent of eat­ing paste.

Because this is just an Ulti­ma­tum book mas­querad­ing as an Ulti­mate FF title it doesn’t even get it’s own finale. There’s a quicky rev­e­la­tion and then a ‘to be con­cluded in Ulti­ma­tum and Ulti­mate Fan­tas­tic Four: Requiem’.

Two books? If this is an indi­ca­tion of how the Ulti­mate uni­verse will work once the line is rebooted after Ulti­ma­tum, with the sto­ries bleed­ing between titles and into one-shots, then count me out. I get enough of that with the real Mar­vel Universe.

X-Factor #40

Like last issue this book starts off with a note from Peter David that we don’t spoil any of the con­tent in this issue. And there’s a lot of impor­tant stuff hap­pen­ing here.

The bulk of this story con­sists of a meet­ing between Jamie Madrox and one of his last inde­pen­dent dupes, Pas­tor John Mad­docks (last seen back in issue #16). While for the most part it’s just two iden­ti­cal talk­ing heads hav­ing a theo­soph­i­cal dis­cus­sion it’s writ­ten (and drawn) well enough that it’s never bor­ing. Madrox has a lot on his mind after the events of the last issue. Its refresh­ing to see a comic book char­ac­ter work through things in a real­is­tic, human way rather than brush­ing them aside and switch­ing to “punch every­thing” mode.

There’s a series of small reveals that cul­mi­nate in one huge reveal that, if you’ve been fol­low­ing X-Factor from the begin­ning like me, should put a huge grin on your face.

Com­plete List

Adven­ture Comics #0
Trin­ity #38
Dark Avengers #2
Ulti­mate Fan­tas­tic Four #60
Uncanny X-Men #506
X-Factor #40
X-Men Legacy #221

Green Lantern #37

Orig­i­nally I wasn’t going to review this book, but when the Irre­press­ible Rory Byrne demands you read it,  adding “You will shit bricks” you’re required to at least put a few words down.

So here we go.

At the end of the last issue there was this great expec­ta­tion, from Space Ganesh and the other guy,  that Hal Jor­dan would become the leader of the Blue Lanterns. This issue starts out with him “politely” refus­ing the offer before tear­ing off on the two space hip­pies and head­ing after Sine­stro, who’s been spend­ing his spare time cru­ci­fied on the Red Lantern’s cen­tral bat­tery after being cap­tured dur­ing the Rage of the Red Lanterns one shot.

There’s some clear delin­eation between the three rings: Green are cops, Red are ani­mals and Blue are saints. They later live up to the bible metaphor by part­ing an actual red sea. The true nature of the red spec­trum is explored a bit more. It seems that the rings are lit­tle more then par­a­sites. After purg­ing the host body’s blood they take over motor func­tions and most thought processes. Much like those hor­rific wasps that ride around on cockroaches.

While it’s not the first time Hal Jor­dan has worn mul­ti­ple rings (see here and here) that chap­ter end­ing def­i­nitely rates as one of the coolest moments of this entire Green Lantern vol­ume. Yes, Rory, bricks were shat.

Dark Avengers #1

There’s two ways they could’ve gone in this issue:

• through a series of small inter­con­nected scenes, show “the boss” trav­el­ling around putting the team together through a num­ber of every expand­ing word bal­loons; or
• some­thing interesting.

Guess which road Bendis went down?

I’m prob­a­bly being too harsh here as the book isn’t a total wash. They’ve got Mike Deodato on art  for one thing, con­tin­u­ing the good work he did on Thun­der­bolts. I thought the expres­sions on each of the ex-Thunderbolts, espe­cially Bullseye’s, as they realise all their dreams have come true were great. Deoad­ato on art and most of the Thun­der­bolts star­ring. They couldn’t have made it any more obvi­ous that this is a con­tin­u­a­tion of the Thun­der­bolts line.

Hope­fully the new mem­bers aren’t going to take the Sentry’s mopey bull­shit. If I could have one request, please give me one issue where they beat the ever-loving shit out of him for being such a sad case. Do that and I’m in for the long haul.

Mighty Avengers #21

This is a great exam­ple of how to make the Ulti­mate line redun­dant. While over in Ulti­ma­tum They’ve had to deal with a flood sub­merg­ing New York, here in the reg­u­lar old 616, New York has been hit with a del­uge of blood, Canada is choked with flesh eat­ing locusts and some­where else  the New Avengers are being used as fer­tiliser for fast grow­ing sen­tient plants and the entire state of Okla­homa has van­ished. Sud­denly the split sec­ond flash flood­ing in the Ulti­mate uni­verse doesn’t seem that ulti­mate anymore.

The recruit­ing scenes aren’t all that dis­sim­i­lar to those in Dark Avengers, but they’re car­ried off a lot bet­ter. Biblical-level crazy shit is a great moti­va­tor. The book shares a lot of the same beats as Dark Avengers, but the way Slott writes dia­logue makes it a much more enter­tain­ing read. See Amadeus Cho’s con­ver­sa­tions with Pym. Both books also share a sim­i­lar antag­o­nist. Dark Avengers gets Dr Doom’s ex, Mor­gane Le Fay while Mighty Avengers has a pos­sessed Quick­sil­ver and some shirt­less guy who likes writ­ing on himself

Which book you grab depends on how you like your heroes. Do you like the bad guys mas­querad­ing as the world’s heroes, albeit offi­cially? Grab Dark Avengers. Do you like you heroes just doing hero-ey stuff? Grab Mighty Avengers. Do you like your heroes to be the under­dogs, strug­gling to get on in a world where they’re oper­at­ing ille­gally? Grab New Avengers. (reviewed next week, fight fans!)

X-Factor #39

There would be a fairly detailed review here. I say “would be” because at the begin­ning of the book Peter David swears all read­ers to secrecy and asks that we don’t spoil the book. So I’ll hon­our that. What I can say is that the book is well on it’s way back to it’s first year lev­els of awe­some­ness. After flip­ping to the back cover I had to sit alone on the couch for a good five min­utes just to digest what I’d read. It’s been a long time since a comic had that much of an emo­tional impact on me. Bravo, Peter David, bravo. Good to see the art back on track after the mis­step that was the Stro­man period too.

Com­plete List:

Final Cri­sis: Super­man Beyond #2 (of 2)
Green Lantern #37
Trin­ity #34
Aston­ish­ing X-Men #28
Dark Avengers #1
Mighty Avengers #21
Thun­der­bolts #128
Uncanny X-Men Annual #2
X-Factor #39
X-Men: Legacy #220
Angel: After the Fall #16